Open Content Alliance

» see opencontentalliance.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Open Content Alliance was the open alternative to Google Books and it ran on Microsoft's money. When Microsoft stopped writing the checks the alliance did not announce anything at all. It just quietly stopped being the organization a library called when it wanted a scanner in the building.

It was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo and the Internet Archive, with the University of California and the University of Toronto in the founding group and around forty institutional contributors eventually attached. Google Book Search had been announced a year earlier and the whole point of the alliance was the difference in how the two projects treated permission. Google scanned and took things down when somebody complained. The alliance asked first, which limited it to public domain works and to books whose rights holders had actively said yes.

The other difference was what happened to the file afterward. Scanning was administered by the Internet Archive, which stored the results and served them from its own site with no contract restricting what anyone did with them. Google's scans lived inside Google's interface and stayed there. If you cared about who ended up holding the copy, the alliance was the only side of the argument with a coherent answer.

Microsoft joined in the same month it launched, for a book search product of its own, and paid for the overwhelming majority of the scanning that actually happened. On 23 May 2008, Satya Nadella posted on the Live Search blog that Microsoft was ending Live Search Books and Live Search Academic. Brewster Kahle described the financial effect as significant, which was the polite version. The alliance was a funding structure with a mission statement on top of it, and the funding was one company.

This was an argument between two American corporations about who got to copy the contents of American and British university libraries, and my distance from it is the only kind that matters, which is that neither side was ever going to scan anything I could read in my first language. Turkish collections were not on the list in 2005 and they were not on it in 2015. The version of this fight that reached anyone outside those libraries was the version everybody got: one search box, snippet view, three lines of a book you cannot see the fourth line of.

~ the dossier ~

~ opt in and opt out ~

Google's position was that scanning a book to make it searchable was fair use, and that publishers who objected could ask to be excluded. The Authors Guild sued in 2005 and the case ran for years, producing a proposed settlement that handed Google a licensing arrangement over orphan works which no competitor could obtain. Judge Denny Chin rejected it in March 2011. Kahle had campaigned against it throughout, on the grounds that a court was about to grant one company a permanent structural advantage over the printed record.

The alliance's opt-in rule kept it out of court entirely and also kept it small. Asking permission means most twentieth-century publishing is off the table, because the rights are unclear or because nobody answers the letter. So the open project could scan the nineteenth century freely and the twentieth century barely at all, while the project doing it the aggressive way got the books people actually search for. That trade was visible to everyone involved from the first week.

~ the day the money left ~

Microsoft's exit was better behaved than most corporate withdrawals. It lifted the contractual restrictions on everything it had paid to scan, so those books became as free as the rest, and it left the scanning equipment with the libraries and digitization partners rather than repossessing it. Kahle thanked them publicly for both. Around 300,000 of the public domain titles Microsoft financed still sit in Internet Archive collections.

It ended the alliance anyway. An organization whose function is to coordinate scanning does not survive the loss of the party paying for the scanning, however graciously that party leaves. There was talk of public funding to replace it and some of that materialized in smaller amounts, but the industrial-scale operation, the one that could put a hundred cameras in a library and keep them running, did not restart.

~ what is still there ~

The failure is organizational and the output survived completely, which is the Internet Archive's usual record. Every scan the alliance produced is still online and still downloadable. The equipment stayed in the libraries. Open Library, which the Archive launched in 2007 out of the same institutional habit, is still running and still fighting its own version of the same lawsuit.

opencontentalliance.org no longer resolves. Google Books is still there, still showing you three lines of a great many books that nobody can read in full. The open answer lost on funding and the closed one won on nothing much except the willingness to do it without asking, and the thing both of them were fighting over remains half-copied and half-locked twenty years later.

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